On the Beach with Morrie Ryskind

EDWIN McDOWELL

The most deafening silence of recent years occurred a few days after John F. Kennedy, speaking in Hollywood a year ago, delivered his scathing attack on “right-wing extremists.” Exhilarated by a lynch-Republicans political crowd, the President solemnly anathematized all those who criticize national policy during times of danger, and who attribute every American Cold War setback to treason on high. The cheers and the plaudits of the Liberal press had not subsided when all of a sudden Representative Donald Bruce (R., Ind.) dropped what might as well have been a fifty-megaton bomb. Bruce came up with the text of a Jan. 30, 1949 speech by Rep. John F. Kennedy, delivered—of all places!—in Salem, Massachusetts, wherein Mr. Kennedy denounced FDR’s “confused and vacillating” policies and scored our entire wartime foreign policy, charging that “what our young men had saved, our diplomats and our President frittered away.”

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Edwin McDowell

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EDWIN McDOWELL

The most deafening silence of recent years occurred a few days after John F. Kennedy, speaking in Hollywood a year ago, delivered his scathing attack on “right-wing extremists.” Exhilarated by a lynch-Republicans political crowd, the President solemnly anathematized all those who criticize national policy during times of danger, and who attribute every American Cold War setback to treason on high. The cheers and the plaudits of the Liberal press had not subsided when all of a sudden Representative Donald Bruce (R., Ind.) dropped what might as well have been a fifty-megaton bomb. Bruce came up with the text of a Jan. 30, 1949 speech by Rep. John F. Kennedy, delivered—of all places!—in Salem, Massachusetts, wherein Mr. Kennedy denounced FDR’s “confused and vacillating” policies and scored our entire wartime foreign policy, charging that “what our young men had saved, our diplomats and our President frittered away.”